Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : Dynamics and Design Conference 2016
Date : August 23, 2016 - August 26, 2016
Gait measurements and physical fitness tests are carried out in the community health activities for health promotion and care prevention services in the growing elderly population. In particular, the timed up and go test (TUG) is the clinical test most often used to evaluate functional mobility in many clinical institutions or local communities. To evaluate the functional mobility during the TUG, some walking parameters such as stride length, step length and step width have to be measured. A gait measurement system (Laser-TUG system) using a laser range sensor (LRS) for evaluating functional mobility in the TUG has been proposed. The system track both legs and measures the foot contact positions to obtain walking parameters. To reduce the false tracking and improve the measurement accuracy during the turning phase of the TUG, a data association considering gait phase and a spline-based interpolation have been proposed. However, the measurement accuracy during the turning phase is still deteriorated in the TUG turning phase. Therefore, this paper presents a high-accuracy gait measurement system using multiple LRSs. To improve the measurement accuracy of observed leg position, the integrated leg detection method by a weighted mean of the observation candidates observed using each LRS data based on the distance from the LRS because the measurement accuracy is depending on the distance from the sensor. From the experimental results, we confirm that the proposed leg detection method can improve the measurement accuracy of the leg trajectory and walking parameters.
